Scriverius was a distinguished historian, poet, and scholar of classical literature. His wife, Anna van der Aar, was the daughter of a Leiden city councilman. In this pair of portraits Hals employs the scale, oval format, and illusionistic framing device that for several decades had been common in Dutch portrait prints. The male portrait alone was engraved in 1626, by Jan van de Velde II; impressions would have been sent to scholarly colleagues throughout Europe. The panels were retained as family keepsakes, in which Hals achieved the same vivid effects that he usually described on a much larger scale.

Catalogue Entry

This small portrait and its pendant, Anna van der Aar (The Met, 29.100.9), are certainly by Hals and are each monogrammed and dated 1626. The sitters lived in Leiden, though Hals would have painted them in Haarlem, where they both had close ties. Pieter Schrijver—who is better known by his Latinized name, Petrus Scriverius—was the eldest son of Hendrik Schrijver, an Amsterdam merchant, and of Cornelia Soop, who came from a wealthy family in Haarlem. The couple settled there, and when business concerns obliged Hendrik Schrijver to move his family back to Amsterdam, Pieter was left in the care of his mother's sister. The boy attended Latin school in Haarlem, and transferred at the age of nineteen to the University of Leiden. Six years later, in 1599, he married Anna van der Aar, daughter of the city councilman and sheriff, Willem Govertsz van der Aar. Scriverius spent the rest of his life in Leiden studying classical literature and the history of the Netherlands. He was associated with leading scholars of the day, including the esteemed French humanist and Leiden professor Joseph Justus Scaliger, whose poems he edited. Scriverius also published Dutch poems of his own composition, as well as an edition of Seneca's tragedies (1621) and commentaries on other classical authors. He is best remembered, however, for his histories of the Netherlands and of particular provinces, Batavia illustrata (1609), Beschryving van Oud Batavien (1612), and Principes Hollandiae, Zelandiae et Frisiae (1650).

The painting was engraved by Jan van de Velde II in 1626 (The Met, 24.57.27). Below the engraved portrait is a tablet inscribed with an anonymous poem in Latin extolling the sitter's admirable qualities. In the case of pendant portraits of a public figure and his wife, it was normal that (as in this case) only the male portrait would be engraved. Hals's portrait of Scriverius's wife, Anna van der Aar, thus indicates that the scholar's portrait was not made solely as a modello for a print, but also as a personal keepsake. The scale and design of the two portraits, however, were certainly determined by the intention of having Scriverius's image immortalized in an engraving. The fact that Van de Velde's print does not bear the name of a publisher implies that it was intended mainly for private distribution, a gesture common in the academic community. Formal precedents for Hals's composition—with the figure penetrating the plane of the framing device—were plentiful, notably in portraits of the 1590s by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), Haarlem's most famous artist of the time.

Van de Velde's engraving after Hals's portrait, or the portrait itself, has been said to have served as a model for one of Rembrandt's most memorable portrait prints, that of the deceased preacher Jan Cornelisz Sylvius (1563/64–1638; see Schwartz 1985, Slive 1989, and Welzel 1991). Some influence is plausible, though the Rembrandt etching is closer to Hals's small portrait of the Haarlem theologian Johannes Acronius, of 1627, and to his small Portrait of a Man on copper, probably also from 1627 (both Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).

In addition to his relationship with Haarlem artists, Scriverius has been identified as a likely patron of Rembrandt in Leiden during the mid-1620s. Late in life, he became the owner of Rembrandt's The Standard Bearer (Floris Soop, 1604–1657) of 1654 (The Met, 49.7.35). The canvas depicts the scholar's nephew. As the bachelor's sole heir, Scriverius inherited the portrait, but never saw it, having gone blind four years before it was painted.

Seymour Slive. Frans Hals. Vol. 3, Catalogue. London, 1974, pp. 22–23, 35, no. 36, calls it a modello for a print; states that the two pendants may have been in the collection of Theodorus Schrevelius in Leiden in 1628 [see Ref. Moes 1905].

Esmée Quodbach. "'Rembrandt's "Gilder" is here': How America Got its First Rembrandt and France Lost Many of its Old Masters." Simiolus 31, no. 1/2 (2004), p. 99, fig. 7 (photograph of Havemeyer library).